Hasta La Creative!

“Borders. Has anything good ever come of them?” asks a voiceover in the spot below, as gray-scale images of walls, fences and “No Trespassing” signs speed past.

“Separation? Limits? I’ve seen as many as mankind has been able to create. Invisible borders. Human ones. Between men and women. Between the thin and the fat. Between those who make decisions and those who abide by them.”

At first, it feels like a social-issues PSA, with moody footage of traffic jams, military parades, riots and even a grade-school bathroom “swirly” tossed in for good measure. Actually, it’s a commercial for a leading brand in Mexico, whose identity isn’t revealed until the final seconds of the riveting minute-long ad:

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In yet another recreation of a 1997 experiment to try to get people to fall in love, Ray-Ban got a bunch of carefully chosen strangers to answer questions and look into each other’s eyes for four minutes.

The brand said it hoped the subjects would open their hearts. It didn’t say anything explicit about love, but creating closeness where it doesn’t exist was the objective of the original Dr. Arthur Aron experiment—which The New York Times recently brought back into public discussion, spurring lots of four-minute eye-to-eye experiments, including a similar commercial from Prudential Singapore.

Perhaps inspired by the darkness of their classic shades, Ray-Ban’s spots are black-and-white, moody, full of dark colors, and focus less on the redeeming intimacy of staring into a stranger’s eyes than on the heart-wrenching stories that the questions elicit. Either happy stuff happened and was edited out, or the people who made the final cut simply haven’t had a lot of happy moments in their lives.

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A Sainsbury’s supermarket in England recently put out an ad seeing an “ambitious artist to voluntarily refurbish our canteen.” But what they really need is a scotobiologist, since all they got in response was shade. 

Artists, you see, don’t like being asked to work for free by companies that are more than able to pay them, and a number of them voiced their frustration on social media using the hashtag #PayArtists. 

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This week is American Craft Beer Week. To celebrate, craft brewers have teamed up to create a single beer, which is being made using the same recipe by more than 100 craft brewers—and in an act of even greater unity, features the names of 4,490 craft brewers from all 50 states on the can.

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Agencies talk a lot about brand DNA. Well, this Brooklyn agency’s brand is its DNA.

Travis Weihermuller and Dominic Santalucia want their shop, lifeblood, to explore “what makes us human.” So, they did so literally with their brand identity—by having their DNA analyzed in a lab, and pulling sequences that were unique to each of them.

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Advertising awards have reached peak honesty with the Handys, a new (fake) show that isn’t a show at all—it’s an app where you get a prize just for shaking your phone up and down like a real wanker. (Really: Pull up handyawards.org on your phone, and go to town.)

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Hundreds of years from now, a new bionic race of human beings will look back on this moment—among other vestiges of our time—and conclude we all shared a god after all. (It’s happened before.)

Remember Glimpse, the socially conscious agency that wants to fill a London subway station with nothing but billboards of cats? With just three days left on their Kickstarter campaign, they’ve found a way to sweeten the deal.

Battersea, the animal rescue center and one of the U.K.’s biggest charities, has agreed to partner with Glimpse to put stray cats on the posters—so, in addition to thinking fewer ad-cluttered thoughts on their commute, Londoners may actually be able to take a furry friend home with them. 

But that’s not all. The agency could still use help getting this off the ground. 

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There was a time when a big company like 3M might have sent a nasty letter to the agencies waging a Post-it war on Canal Street—telling them to quit sullying its brand name in social posts. These days, though, any company that knows anything about social would be thrilled to see something like this develop.

And 3M was.

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Some of the best food on Earth is pretty greasy, so one agency in Thailand has come up with a simple way to lighten things up.

BBDO Bangkok partnered with the Thai Health Promotion Foundation to address Thailand’s obesity problem, largely linked to the amount of oil used in the country’s popular cuisine. 

Instead of trying to change how the food is cooked, the client and agency chose instead fo focus on how the food is served.

They created the AbsorbPlate, which features 500 perforations that catch and hold some of the grease from your meal. They claim it will capture 7 mL of oil, which is about one and a half teaspoons. That’s not much, but it does shave about 30 calories off the total.

Check out the video case study and credits below:

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Here’s a gum for people who feel they’ve bitten off more than they can chew.

Wrigley’s Orbit is rolling out a new campaign tagged “Time to Shine,” a shift from the brand’s familiar “Just brushed clean feeling” to something more aspirational.

“The idea is that when you have a clean mouth or fresh breath, you feel more confident,” John Starkey, regional vice president of marketing at Wrigley Americas, tells AdFreak. “The scripts are a celebration of what can happen when you feel ready to take on your ‘Time to Shine’ moment.”

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